Time’s up for the Yes2Rail blog, which I launched on June 30, 2008 as a paid consultant on Honolulu's elevated rail project. Yes2Rail’s August 13, 2012 post was its last following the author's move to Sacramento, CA. You’re invited to read four-plus years of information-packed entries, many of which are linked at our “aggregation site.” Look for the paragraph with red copy in the right-hand column, below. Mahalo for all the positive comments Yes2Rail received since its start.

Monday, July 9, 2012

If Anti-Railer Pushes One Message above the Rest, What’s an Education-Focused Web Log To Do?

We’ve had 48 hours to
reflect on this blog’s role since the Star-Advertiser’s story on Yes2Rail and
its “sometimes biting” content.

Yes2Rail exists to educate
the public about rail issues, so what’s its role when anti-railer-in-chief
Cliff Slater and his friends distribute deceptive messages they hope will damage
the Honolulu rail project?

If you sift through Mr.
Slater’s thousands of words in his decades-long opposition to rail, you find
recurring themes. One of them is a preference for driving a car, which he says
preserves the individual’s independence and freedom of choice about where and
when to travel, whereas rail transit restricts movement along a fixed path
according to a timetable.

That’s one way to look at
personal mobility, but it slides right by the whole traffic issue and the link between
congestion and population: As the latter grows, so does
congestion while the driver’s options shrink.

That being the case, Mr.
Slater’s message of choice recently is his assertion that rail will essentially
have a minimal benefit in addressing Oahu’s growing traffic congestion. Here’s
what he posted on his website just two days ago:

“We have shown
that…automobile traffic will be 23 percent more (in 2030) than we have today if we don’t build
rail and 21 percent if we do, which would not be a noticeable difference.”

And right there is an
example of how to deceive the public about rail’s future benefit. We posted
about this on Thursday and again Friday, and since Mr. Slater continues to use
this deceptive message, we think it’s a legitimate topic here at Yes2Rail again
today.

The ‘Whole Argument’

Traffic congestion in the
future will be greater than it is today.
Mr. Slater has been using that message to fight rail for years, but his delivery
implies that rail will be a failure if it doesn’t actually reduce traffic congestion.

It’s a preposterous
suggestion, of course, and we’ve been calling him on it every since he started
using this particular sleight of hand. Two years ago this week, Civil Beat
published an interview with Mr. Slater in which he floated this message:

“In talking to groups
about rail, I tell them that there’s really two things you need to know about
it. Number one, it’s gonna cost five and one-half billion dollars before cost
overruns, and the second thing is that traffic congestion with rail in the
future will be worse than it is today. And then I ask them if they have any
questions, and that kinda sums up the whole argument.”

Yes2Rail’s “aggregation site” has links to numerous posts under the Mr. Cliff Slater heading, and look what’s happened: Having been
called out on his deceptive message for the past two years, Mr. Slater has switched his tune and now says,
yes, there will be more congestion, but rail won’t reduce it much.

Go to the Source

As we noted in last week’s
posts, a relatively small reduction in the amount of traffic can produce
significant reductions in the amount of time that is lost to that traffic.
Quoting the Final Environmental Impact Statement:

“…even moderate decreases
in traffic volumes under congested conditions can result in relatively large
decreases in travel delay.”

The FEIS
says vehicle hours of delay will be reduced 18 percent with rail operating in
2030. And since that’s an island-wide reduction in vehicle hours of delay, it means that the most congested
corridors may experience as much as a 30-percent reduction in hours lost to
congestion compared to the no-build option.

Mr. Slater’s website doesn’t
tell you that. If you have the time and motivation, you might be able to scroll
through the FEIS to find where it refutes his wildfire of misinformation, but
going to the FEIS isn’t what most of us do.

So what are rail
educators supposed to do in the face of the anti-railer-in-chief’s tactics -- especially since the mainstream media either don't know enough about rail or care enough to examine them?

Until recently, the federal
government’s response to actual forest wildfires was to let them burn. That didn’t work so well, so the modern
response is to aggressively contain those wildfires. It’s called fighting fire
with fire, and it seems to work.

5 comments:

Anonymous
said...

This one is easy. UHM's total enrollment is under 20,500. Population on Oahu is about 950,000. Yet when UHM is out of session, traffic improves. 20,500/950,000 is about the same 2%. Noticeable difference from that 2% right? =)

At this point I'm afraid the truth is swimming up stream. Until the media takes a stance to report the truth while reporting the news things won't change. Great examples of this is many American's until this day believe WMD's were found in Iraq and of course many still believe President Obama was born in Kenya.

And in other entertainment sitings, the news site/gossip blog dubbed Civil Beat has commissioned a notoriously suspicious and opinionated (and often laughably hypocritical) cat-loving rail-hater for a three-part news series on "election issues."

Well, maybe he only hates rail on some days, and on other days yearns for it to be impossibly perfect through magic or something. It's kind of hard to tell.

Hiring such a shoot-first-and-let-them-defend-themselves-if-they-want-to opinion-slinger to produce news stories about elections might be garden variety poor judgement had the blogger not (1) recently become (along with a few other commentator types who damn sure know better) a truth-stretching apologist for the boatload of illegal campaign donations received not so long ago by the anti-rail mayoral candidate; and (2) just days ago publicly declared his vehement opposition to one of the two candidates who support rail.

The first CB installment was a snoozer that only the wonkiest will manage to slog through, so it's doubtful that this reasonably obvious conflict of interest will matter much to anything but CB's nascent credibility. CB's introductory references to his knee-jerk-opinion-riddled blog don't exactly project the notion of objectivity. Whatever.

But it's a tad ironic that his blog post today highlighted a new book by an outspoken (and highly misinformed) rail opponent. While the historical tome is unrelated to rail (and irrelevant to this election), the blogger was thrilled to find that it referenced his own earlier suspicions about, drum role please, conflicts of interest.

To paraphrase Captain Willard: "The bull(droppings) piled up so fast in Honolulu media that you needed wings to stay above it."

This Isn't Political

Yes2Rail is a blog about the Honolulu rail transit project, which has become the key issue in this year’s mayoral race. We comment on the candidates’ plans to address Oahu’s growing congestion problem and whether those plans could meet the need as well as elevated rail can and will. That’s not the same as criticizing the candidates, and we urge our readers to recognize the difference.

Another red-light runner meets Denver at-grade train, 6.13.12

Honolulu rail will be elevated, with zero possibility for accidents like those shown in this column in cities with at-grade systems. Visit our "aggregation site" for much more on why elevated rail is the only reasonable way to build Honolulu rail.

What riding the train will avoid

Bus Accident Aftermath on H-1

'Black Tuesday'--9/5/06 Crash Produced Nightmare Commute

Typical H-1 Traffic

About Me

After five years of active-duty service as an Army officer with duty stations in West Berlin and South Vietnam, reported and edited for newspapers and broadcast stations (including all-news radio) in Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and Honolulu. Covered Honolulu city government for the Honolulu Advertiser and KGMB-TV. Served on Congressman Cec Heftel's staff in Honolulu and Washington, then managed corporate communications and was Hawaiian Electric Company's spokesman for nearly a decade. A communications consultant for 19 years before moving to California in 2012. Launched, produced and hosted Hawaii Public Radio's "live" weekly "Energy Futures" public affairs program in 2009-10. Authored books on The National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific ("Punchbowl" 1982) and on the decline of standard grammar in business and society ("Me and Him Are Killing English!" 2007). Now an information officer with the California Department of Water Resources.